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Water Needs Electricity Needs Water …

Poseidon ResourcesPoseidon Resources won approval to build a giant desalination plant near San Diego. It will use a lot of electricity, but the company is seeking ways to offset that.

It has long been an axiom of infrastructure planning that it takes a lot of water to make electricity, and a lot of electricity to make water.

Each day, for example, the nation’s thermoelectric power plants (90 percent of all power plants in the United States), draw 136 billion gallons of water from lakes, rivers and oceans to cool the steam used to drive turbines, according to the Department of Energy. In recent years, the energy department says, plans for new power plants had to be scrapped because water-use permits could not be obtained.

For their part, water- and wastewater utilities consume at least 13 percent of the electricity drawn nationwide each day (a figure that includes end-user heating), according to River Network, an environmental group based in Portland, Ore. Such plants face increasing public pressure to cut energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

So it was of no small significance that Poseidon Resources last week managed to win approval from California state regulators to build the Western Hemisphere’s largest desalination plant, near San Diego.

Water is an increasingly scarce commodity in the West, so ocean desalination projects are attractive to city and regional planners. But desalination is also inherently energy-intensive, and it will take more electricity to desalinate water at the new facility than to import it from elsewhere, as the utility does now.

Indeed, San Diego Gas & Electric will produce 97,165 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually to supply the Carlsbad desalination plant with the 274,400 MWh of electricity it needs to produce 50 million gallons of drinking water each day for a year.

By comparison, pumping the same volume from the north requires 112,005 MWh; and pumping it from the Colorado River Aqueduct, San Diego’s secondary source of water, requires 167,900 MWh each year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

By 2012, the water authority expects less than half of its drinking water to come from the Delta and 10 percent to come from desalinated seawater.

Poseidon also says it plans to spend $55 million improving the plant’s energy efficiency, and it has pledged to use renewable energy sources and voluntarily purchase carbon offsets.

On the East Coast, meanwhile, similar efforts to mitigate the tension between water and power are underway. In February, for example, New York’s Astoria Energy asked Denver-based G.E.A. Power Cooling to design, build and erect an air-cooled condenser for a 575-megawatt natural-gas power plant it expects to bring online in 2011.

The condenser will use no water for the cooling.

And New Jersey’s Atlantic County Utilities Authority (ACUA), which taps wind, biodiesel, solar and landfill gas energy to power its wastewater and trash-recycling operations, says it saved more than $893,000 in electricity costs last year by using renewable sources.

The relationship between water and energy is especially important in the U.S. southeast, a region which for years has seen population growth, increased electricity usage, and worsening drought conditions.

Electric power production in the Southeast draws about 40 billion gallons of water daily–65 percent of total freshwater withdrawals–about equal to the freshwater withdrawals for public supply across the entire country. About a gallon of water is consumed for each kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity produced.

Here are a few recommendations for policymakers the World Resources Institute and our partners recently came up with to deal with this:

– Evaluate how new electric power production will impact water resources
– Prioritize investments in energy resources and technologies that use little or no freshwater
– Educate consumers about the links between energy and water use
– Encourage investment in energy efficiency
– Demonstrate leadership with energy efficient public buildings
– Offer financial incentives to spur markets for energy efficient homes, equipment, and products

Why not combine water desalination with a plasma converter such as (Startech )makes! It would use less water to produce electricity,use a renewable resource garbage to power the whole operation,the syngas produced could be captured to produce Hydrogen and bio-fuels. Start thinking Green!

River Network found that in total, when water heating for end-uses is included, water-related energy use in the United States is at least 520 million MWh per year—equivalent to 13% of the country’s electricity consumption. Including the energy for other end uses (pressurization, advanced purification, cooling, etc.) would make the figure even higher.

A widely-cited report commissioned by the Electric Power Research Institute nearly a decade ago (2000) concluded that water- and wastewater utilities consume roughly 4% of the electricity drawn nationwide each day. The report was never intended to be a definitive analysis and actual electricity consumption could be much higher due to wider use of energy intensive water supplies such as desalination (discussed in this article) and more stringent water treatment standards.

River Network and other stakeholders have been urging for more research into this field so that we can better understand the full magnitude of the energy demands associated with water use in this country. For more information, see our report “The Carbon Footprint of Water” at: http://rivernetwork.org/resource-library/carbon-footprint-water.

When is Green Inc. going to report on the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF GALLONS A YEAR THAT BIG SOLAR AND BIG GEOTHERMAL WILL WASTE?

rooftop solar uses NO water at all, but it gets a bad rap because it is fundamentally DEMOCRATIC and it makes it much harder to hijack ratepayers if we have our own (at least partial) energy generation systems. Big Solar uses a minimum of 90,000 gallons of water/year/mW just to rinse mirrors, and often much more. it uses BILLIONS for water cooling, which is the only way to make the construction (more like de-struction) affordable and the output high enough during peak hours. geothermal inevitably runs out of groundwater and requires BILLIONS of gallons a year to be pumped in from aquifers, lakes and streams.

and rooftop solar uses NO water. time for San Diego and other SW cities, counties and states to get their act together, implement feed in tariffs whether their corrupt utilities want them or not, and get people their AB 811 loans so we can start making a difference.

if global warming is urgent, then we need to STOP BLOCKING POINT OF USE SOLUTIONS. the answer is not to centralize production by slaughtering millions more acres of wilderness, dehydrating our region beyond redemption, running thousands more miles of SF6 spewing powerlines (which will INCREASE GLOBAL WARMING), and destroying our environment while ripping off ratepayers. it’s called sustainability.

if global warming is not urgent enough to allow clean power to be produced in the built environment by American individuals, then it is certainly not urgent enough to destroy a single acre of wilderness.

Another thing to consider is the under developed potential of wastewater treatment plants to generate electricity and other forms of energy. Basic biogas capture and use is already common at treatment plants. Besides scaling up that process and making it more efficient, there is also potential to generate biodiesel for algae grown on the treatment ponds and to integrate different scales of hydropower into the fresh and foul water systems.

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How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, our reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers.